I. Field
The present invention relates generally to communication, and more specifically to pilot transmission and channel estimation for a communication system.
II. Background
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation technique that partitions the overall system bandwidth into multiple (K) orthogonal subbands. These subbands are also called tones, subcarriers, and frequency bins. With OFDM, each subband is associated with a respective subcarrier that may be modulated with data.
OFDM has certain desirable characteristics such as high spectral efficiency and robustness against multipath effects. However, a major drawback with OFDM is a high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), which means that the ratio of the peak power to the average power of an OFDM waveform can be high. The high PAPR for the OFDM waveform results from possible in-phase (or coherent) addition of all the subcarriers when they are independently modulated with data. In fact, it can be shown that the peak power can be up to K times greater than the average power for OFDM.
The high PAPR for the OFDM waveform is undesirable and may degrade performance. For example, large peaks in the OFDM waveform may cause a power amplifier to operate in a highly non-linear region or possibly clip, which would then cause intermodulation distortion and other artifacts that can degrade signal quality. The degraded signal quality can adversely affect performance for channel estimation, data detection, and so on.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques that can mitigate the deleterious effects of high PAPR in multi-carrier modulation.